"Take a stand and dare to be brave"The conference opened with Nicolas Hasselqvist, curator of Sweden's Unstraight Museum, from which the name of the conference was borrowed. "We are not the ones to define what un-straight is; that's your job," he explained.

With no permanent funding, the future of this organisation is always uncertain, which seemed to be one of the key threads running through all of the presentations over the two days. Funding is key; funding is lacking. Of 55,000 museums worldwide, 312 are about Elvis, 12 are about lunchboxes and only two are un-straight.

From the margins to the mainstreamIn order to work with small budgets, partnerships are essential. Gary Everett, director of Homotopia, spoke about some of the significant partnerships the organisation has forged with institutions in Liverpool, enabling them to put on exhibitions, queer tours and performances. These partnerships have also allowed the organisation to run intervention projects by artists such as Phil Sayers and Rikke Lundgreen, who were well received at the Walker Art Gallery but whose transvestite reinterpretations of Victorian work led to the first physical attack on a work by an angry audience member in the Lady Lever Art Gallery's 100-year history.

Such instances highlight the importance of collating audience responses. Despite the focus on homoerotic content in the Walker Gallery's recent David Hockney exhibition, 71% of feedback was positive and only 6% made reference to its LGBT content, suggesting a generally accepting audience, more interested in the art itself.

Accordingly, the gallery is actively developing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) strand in its acquisitions department. As Ann Bukantas, head of fine art, notes: "Whatever we do, there's always going to be someone out there who criticises it. But the more we do it and the more often we do it, the more people we'll touch."

Talking about the challenges of working on the April Ashley project, Homotopia's project manager, Bev Ayre, emphasised how she would "urge any small groups to approach larger establishments about working together, using April Ashley as an example". An ambitious two-and-a-half year project, worked up from an archive consisting of two bin bags and a suitcase full of photographs and letters, the main goal was to find a balance between fulfilling the requirements of the funders and staying true to the subject. Lessons learned on how to manage this, included:

• Broadening the project to stress its universal themes and issues• Increasing opportunities for participation, learning and engagement• Setting out an achievable delivery schedule and budget• Working with reputable partners

Diversifying audiences and exhibiting differencesDay two began with a presentation by Zorian Clayton, assistant curator at the V&A, and Marcus Dickey Horley, curator of access and special projects at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, each of whom spoke of the ways in which their institutions try to cover LGBT issues. Clayton is part of an unofficial lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) network within the V&A staff, which organises one-off events such as bringing in performance artist Bird la Bird to give queer tours and hosting London's LGBT community choir, the Pink Singers.

It is currently trying to branch out to ensure a presence at regular events, such as the museum's popular Friday Lates. All of this is done completely voluntarily, without a budget, pulling in favours from friends.

Horley, on the other hand, is able to squeeze some LGBT events into the scope of his "special projects" budget, which has led to ground-breaking success in visitor numbers and public response, such as David Hoyle's risqué Tate Modern Queer Tour, Timberlina's Queer Confidence performance tour or the Queer Britannia tour at the reopening of Tate Britain in 2013. This unticketed event, for which an audience of around 80-100 was expected, had to cram more than 300 eager people in.

In the latest survey of Tate visitors, 20% of those under 20 answered yes to being LGBTQ. Furthermore, out of a staff of roughly 800, 10% of the workforce at Tate belong to the LGBTQ network. Nevertheless, the point was raised that there is often a disconnect between these LGBTQ groups within larger organisations and the chief curators who continue to mislabel and misuse terminology. For example, at Tate Modern's recent Cy Twombly exhibition, reference was made to each and every one of his relationships with women, but not to one single relationship with a man.

What's in a name?Two highly significant institutions which were set up by gay men in the 1980s include the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York and the Schwules Museum* in Berlin. Representatives from each spoke about the challenges of a growing collection and recent attempts to expand their scope to include LB and T as well as G. Questions were raised as to the appropriateness and requirement for this, and how it might be reflected in the museums' names. The Schwules Museum, for example, recently responded by adding the queer star (*) to its name to symbolise inclusivity without losing the key term "schwul" (gay).

Institutional homophobia?Aside from partnerships and participation, other key points brought out over the two days were the importance of the legacy of LGBT-related projects in terms of:

• Staff training: for example, covering how to handle audience response• Terminology and a more careful consideration of language use• Of course, the biggie with which to engage funders: audience development

With a lack of funding and paid positions, too much is still having to be done voluntarily. As an audience member clearly put: it shouldn't be a matter of LGBT groups within larger organisations having to pull out all the stops to put on LGBT events; it needs incorporating into the museums' key performance indicators and audience development strategies. "Institutional racism has become a recognised term," that person said. "But what about institutional homophobia? It needs ingraining into museum policy."

The five keynote lectures from the Un-Straight Museum conference can be viewed here